Bracketed paste - prevents pasting commands into vim

Problem: Why can't I paste commands into vim?

I've had this problem in at least two environments I work in. It came up against just recently, so I'm taking a moment to document it. Let us say you have the following in your clipboard:

:set tabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 expandtab

So you are inside vim and you press your usual paste keystroke for your terminal e.g. SHIFT + INSERT. You expect the command to appear in the vim command line area, but instead something else happens and maybe some of the clipboard content is pasted into the buffer instead?

😡🤬

Impact: frustration and lost productivity...

Everyone hates to lose their flow state because of annoying issues like this. At least from my 20+ years of experience with Linux, it's a non-standard behaviour (or perhaps a change in the old/legacy behaviour).

Solution: 

It is possible that this issue only affects xterm-like terminals. I use mintty heavily in my daily workflows.

This post on the Stack Exchange vim site captures the problem / solution. Its  straightforward - at runtime and/or in your ~/.vimrc use the following:

" disable bracketed-paste - which prevents pasting commands into vim
set t_BE=

It helps to understand bracketed-paste: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bracketed-paste. In addition it helps to understand the relevant bracketed-paste sections of the vim manual on bracketed-paste.

Citation:

Props to: the people on the Stack Exchange post.